Ableneo radar update Q4 (2022)

Improvements in libraries and tools are happening all the time, and it seems impossible to follow all changes. So here, in ableneo, we encourage our developers to every 3-month discuss what libraries they are using/why should some of them start/stop using them.

These discussions are quite a good way how to share knowledge and therefore be always one of the best developers on projects.

And as developers, we love to have clean code — and also clean documentation. And one of the best ways how to document something is to have it described in the picture — there goes our radar, excellent visualization of our tech stack.

Agile

Up till now, the agile stream does not have been part of our radar — but we are fixing it now!

Frameworks like Scrum / Kanban or Less are well-known for us, and we consider them still useful, so we keep them in Adopted, Spotify model is for us Retired and we try to look into unFix or Shape Up.

Platforms for project management: Jira, Asana, Wrike, ClickUp, or Monday.com are in Assess quadrant, but we are also evaluating Trello and Notion — you can find them in the Trial quadrant.

We can fully recommend undergoing a facelift in the style of Management 3.0 (thus putting it into the Adopted quadrant), as well as Delegation Poker or Celebration Grids. We would be testing some specific use cases with Change Management Game (Trial quadrant) in our current and future projects.

If you would like to know more about OKRs — you are “on good address” we already Adopted this technique.

If you want to know more — follow our dedicated stream of blog posts Ableneo People.

Backend Stream (with infrastructure)

If you are looking for a way to set up the environment & deploy our application quickly, we consider CodeNow (Adopted) as one of the best platforms! Perfect not just for prototyping but also for a mature application.

We found a very interesting topic, Microservices (Adopted). Serverless / Lambda (Adopted) are finding their way into our everyday life — such as Quarkus, GraalVM, or Firecracker, which can significantly improve performance not just for serverless (Trial).

And how do we manage deployment? Docker or Terraform are Adopted, Kubernetes, AWS EKS, Azure AKS, and Helm Charts are in Trial. We think that AWS CloudFormation (Retired) has a better replacement: for example, Kubernetes (see above) or AWS CDK.

We still do love Java (Java 11 — Adopted). On several projects, we are evaluating Kotlin (Trial). And what about Node.js with Deno runtime? We are not blind to them — and definitely, we would like to try them in a real project (Assess).

Reactive systems are very interesting, as well as frameworks like Kotlin Coroutines or Spring web flux (Trial).

An application needs to be monitored, which is why we invest time into Azure Application Insight and Opentelemetry (Trial). We are getting pretty familiar with both — you can await some updates in the future!

We tried to use gRPC in one project, but it was unsuccessful (Retired).

Frontend Stream

Thanks to our colleagues who successfully implemented Module Federation in the project, we can add this technology to Adopted. Now we have knowledge of technology that makes a new, promising architectural concept called Microfrontends possible, and we are pretty sure that we will hear about Microfrontends in the near future.

GitHub Copilot (Trial) is a tool that can make developers' everyday life much easier — why not save time writing simple tests, boilerplate code, etc. …? Copilot can write such snippets of code for you, and we can focus more on important logic.

Graph databases are exciting topics, and with technologies like Graphql and Apollo (for fetching/caching and modifying data), we were able to implement graph databases in our project — moving to Adopt.

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Ableneo radar update Q4 (2022) was originally published in ableneo Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.